1. Field of the Invention
The disclosure relates to a speech synthesis mechanism. More particularly, the disclosure relates to a prosody-based speech synthesis method and a prosody-based speech synthesis apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
As the development of science and technology improved, communication requirements between humans and computers are not never like before that instructions are inputted only by typing and responses are received only in a text form on computers. Therefore, the development of a user-friendly voice communication mechanism between humans and computers has become a very important issue. For a computer, in order to converse human voice into an audio voice, technologies of voice recognition and speech synthesis are required. For instance, a text-to-speech (TTS) technology could be applied to convert a text input into a voice output.
Therefore, the synthesis of prosody speech has become an indispensable technology for most of the prevailing TTS technologies involving prosody speech. For instance, an interactive robot designed for children may need to tell a story which is full of human-like rhythm and emotional prosody. Different contents in a text could be combined with proper prosodic information such that the synthesized speech may become lively and vivid. The prosodic information is manually set in most cases; however, in order to accomplish a satisfactory performance, settings and adjustments of the prosodic information may require significant amount of time based on trial and error.